We propose using statistical regular pavings (SRPs) as an efficient and adaptive statistical data structure for processing massive, multi-dimensional data. A regular paving (RP) is an ordered binary tree that recursively bisects a box in $\Rz^{d}$ along the first widest side. An SRP is extended from an RP by allowing mutable caches of recursively computable statistics of the data. In this study we use SRPs for two major applications: estimating histogram densities and summarising large spatio-temporal datasets. The SRP histograms produced are $L_1$-consistent density estimators driven by a randomised priority queue that adaptively grows the SRP tree, and formalised as a Markov chain over the space of SRPs. A way to select an estimate is to run a Markov chain over the space of SRP trees, also initialised by the randomised priority queue, but here the SRP tree either shrinks or grows adaptively through pruning or splitting operations. The stationary distribution of the Markov chain is then the posterior distribution over the space of all possible histograms. We then take advantage of the recursive nature of SRPs to make computationally efficient arithmetic averages, and take the average of the states sampled from the stationary distribution to obtain the posterior mean histogram estimate. We also show that SRPs are capable of summarizing large datasets by working with a dataset containing high frequency aircraft position information. Recursively computable statistics can be stored for variable-sized regions of airspace. The regions themselves can be created automatically to reflect the varying density of aircraft observations, dedicating more computational resources and providing more detailed information in areas with more air traffic. In particular, SRPs are able to very quickly aggregate or separate data with different characteristics so that data describing individual aircraft or collected using different technologies (reflecting different levels of precision) can be stored separately and yet also very quickly combined using standard arithmetic operations.

Graphics processing units (GPUs) are used today in a wide range of applications, mainly because they can dramatically accelerate parallel computing, are affordable and energy efficient. In the field of medical imaging, GPUs are in some cases crucial for enabling practical use of computationally demanding algorithms. This review presents the past and present work on GPU accelerated medical image processing, and is meant to serve as an overview and introduction to existing GPU implementations. The review covers GPU acceleration of basic image processing operations (filtering, interpolation, histogram estimation and distance transforms), the most commonly used algorithms in medical imaging (image registration, image segmentation and image denoising) and algorithms that are specific to individual modalities (CT, PET, SPECT, MRI, fMRI, DTI, ultrasound, optical imaging and microscopy). The review ends by highlighting some future possibilities and challenges.